Soul Sisters

Mavis Staples

After taping an appearance on last Tuesday’s “Late Show with David Letterman,” Mavis Staples returned to the Hudson Hotel with her sister Yvonne, who sings backup in her band, and they went downstairs to the hotel’s restaurant. They were dressed in faded denim jackets and silk scarves. Mavis, who is seventy-one, is two years younger than her sister, and has short, straight, copper-colored hair; Yvonne wore her dark hair in a perm. They sat in large, thronelike chairs—two queens of soul whom no one seemed to recognize.

Mavis glanced at the drinks menu and put it down, her lilac-colored nails clacking on the plastic coating. She ordered hot tea for her throat. Yvonne asked for a Bloody Mary.

A new Mavis Staples album, “You Are Not Alone,” with songs selected and produced by Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, came out last month, and Staples and her band had been on the road for a couple of weeks, performing to enthusiastic crowds. The album, which relies heavily on the gospel songs that the Staples family grew up singing, has been well reviewed, and the Tweedy connection has brought a lot of younger people to the shows.

“Oh, it’s been good having Mr. Tweedy with us,” Mavis said.

“Real good,” Yvonne said.

“He’s a rock star, you know,” Mavis went on, “so all the young people come out. At Lollapalooza this summer, we did a gospel song, ‘Wonderful Savior.’ ” She sang the title, in a shuddering, rumbling voice. “And I looked at those kids in the audience, with their faces going, Huh? And I thought, Uh-oh. We made a mistake.”

“Uh-oh,” Yvonne chimed in.

“But then the song went on, and I said, ‘Hey, this is going to be all right.’ ”

Mavis lives in Chicago, near Yvonne, on the South Side, and a third Staples sister, Cleotha, lives around the corner. Cleotha has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t really recognize her sisters anymore, but she lights up when they come over and sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” “That song puts a smile on her face every time,” Mavis said.

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” was the first song that their father, Roebuck (Pops) Staples, taught his four children (their older brother, Pervis, also used to sing with them), back in the forties. “Pops had been a singer in a gospel group, the Trumpet Jubilees,” Mavis explained. “He got a little frustrated, because there were six of them but only three or four would show up for a rehearsal. So he bought a guitar in a pawnshop, and he came home and said, ‘You children are going to be my group now.’ ” He arranged their voices in the four-part harmonies he remembered from his boyhood in Mississippi. “My brother sang lead, I sang baritone, Cleotha sang tenor, and Yvonne sang second lead. Our Aunt Katy heard us, and she said, ‘Say, you sound pretty good. You should sing in church.’ So we sang that song in church, and we had to do it three times before people would let us sit back down. I was eight years old. Pops said afterward, ‘We’re going to have to learn more songs.’ ”

The Staple Singers’ early records featured mostly gospel and traditional songs, and Pops’s reedy tremolo guitar. They created a sound that would influence rock bands from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Wilco. By the early seventies, the sound had become a secular funk, which yielded the group’s Top Forty hits. Mavis: “When we started doing songs like ‘I’ll Take You There’ and ‘Respect Yourself,’ the church people got all upset, saying we were playing the Devil’s music and whatnot, but those songs are about the Lord. ‘I’ll Take You There’? Where’s ‘there’?”

“Heaven,” Yvonne said.

“That’s right,” Mavis said, refreshing her voice with some tea. “But I still think our best sound was just our father’s guitar and our voices, and those gospel songs, in the early sixties. Those were the happiest days of my life. To this day, when I get down and low, that’s the music I put on. And that’s what this new record is like—those old songs. Old Mr. Tweedy, he’s smart.”

“Oh, he’s smart,” Yvonne agreed.

“One day, he came up to me and said, ‘Mavis, I got some songs on my iPod I want you to listen to.’ And I listened and said, ‘Why, Tweedy, I haven’t heard those songs in fifty years. I’d love to sing those songs.’ ” ♦

John Seabrook has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1989 and became a staff writer in 1993.